"Queue frustration" increasingly

18 June 2007

Mumbai: NCR Corporation, world leaders in self-service technologies today unveiled its 'Queue Frustration' survey undertaken by ACNielsen amongst 1782 working men and women between the age group of 25 to 45 years across major cities in India including Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Bangalore.

According to the 1,782 respondents surveyed in India,

• 85% of respondents are becoming less patient about queuing at various service providers and 26% of the all India respondents switched to another service provider offering better self-service solutions
• 'Bank' queues was identified as the single biggest source of irritation at 34%
• 'Ticketing' followed at 30%,
• 'Bill Payment' came in third at 27%.

Despite many organisations' attempts to deal with queuing problems the issue continues to affect customer retention as consumers remain prepared to walk away from organisations where they experience problems with queues.

The NCR 'Queue Frustration' survey indicates that consumers want businesses to create an area with another line as a way to reduce the time they need to wait. While, the survey also points out the fact that strategic integration of self-service solutions with smarter staff deployment can be an option to reduce queues and improve overall service.

Deployment of self-service solution frees up staff to deliver on these demands. Such best practices can be shared and applied across sectors such as retail banking, travel (rail ticketing) and retail. Since self-service devices, such as ATMs and kiosks, can potentially offer multiple services including cash, ticketing and bill pay, they give companies the ability to address a number of issues pertinent to queue frustrations and generate extra revenue.